I wanted to believe I was moving forward.
The truth was that I was unraveling.
After Celta died, I was left with grief that had nowhere safe to go. At the grief counseling group, I could speak. With Martin Kirby and his wife, I could read poems and talk about what Celta had meant to me. But in my parents’ house, life continued as though nothing important had happened.
It was not home. It was their home.
I stayed in my room most of the time, though occasionally I was around them, sitting at the kitchen counter or passing through the living room, weighed down by the silence. My parents never spoke of Celta. They did not ask about the grief group. They did not ask what it had been like to be loved by her, or what it felt like to lose her, or why I was moving through the house like someone trying not to disappear.
I longed to share the joy I had known with Celta. I wanted someone to understand that I had not merely lost a friend. I had lost the first person who made me feel fully alive. But the disgust I felt in realizing my parents had no interest in what made me happy left me mute.
Around them, it was as if I had never been in love.
As if I had never lost the one person who had made me feel truly seen.
That silence was its own kind of gaslighting. It poisoned whatever chance I had of healing there.
When Grief Entered the Body
The panic attacks came suddenly, as if grief had found a way to burst through the walls I had built inside.
The first one hit in the middle of the night. My chest tightened like a vise. My breath refused to come. I was certain I was dying.
Terrified, I went downstairs and called out, “Dad.”
I don’t remember what words I used. Maybe I couldn’t even form a sentence. But he understood enough. He drove me to the emergency room.
Under the harsh fluorescent lights, I tried to explain the unexplainable: that I couldn’t breathe, that my heart was pounding so hard I thought it might stop, that death felt close and immediate and impossible to reason away. The doctors called it a panic attack. They gave me something — probably Valium — and after a while, the terror receded enough for me to go home.
But the relief did not last.
The attacks returned, each time convincing me that death was near. I became obsessed with the fear of dying. It was not an abstract fear. It was physical. Immediate. A certainty that rose inside my body before thought could intervene.
I had lost Celta suddenly. One day she existed, and then a phone call told me she did not. I had been shown that death could arrive without warning, without fairness, without negotiation.
My body believed that lesson.
Why Show Me Love?
At the time, I still believed in God.
That made the loss harder, not easier.
I tried to wrestle meaning out of what had happened. I tried to make sense of why I would be shown love — real love, the first love that made me feel seen and wanted and alive — only to have it taken away before the questions between us could be answered.
Why show me love and then take it away?
Why let me know what it felt like to be held in someone’s heart, only to return me to the house where my needs had always seemed inconvenient?
Why let Celta become the first person who truly saw me if she was going to die before I could understand what our love meant?
I could not make sense of it.
The song she had once noticed — “I Don’t Know Much But I Know I Love You” — became more painful after her death. The questions were still unanswered. There was so much we had never broken through. But unlike the singers in the song, we could not ask each other anything anymore.
There was no next conversation.
No next visit.
No next kiss.
No chance to ask whether what had been unnamed between us had become love in the fullest sense.
There was only absence.
The Medication That Twisted My Body
A psychiatrist tried different medications.
One was a tricyclic antidepressant. For brief moments, it seemed to create a sense of artificial well-being, almost like being high. I remember standing in the kitchen one morning while my mother ironed something for work and my father got ready nearby, feeling strangely fine. The song by R.E.M. comes to mind: “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” and somehow I felt fine.
But those feelings were temporary and unreal. They did not create meaning. They did not bring Celta back. They did not give me a safe place to grieve.
At some point, the psychiatrist prescribed what he called a “major tranquilizer.” He explained that in higher doses it was used for psychotic disorders, but in a small dose it might calm me. I wanted to believe him. I wanted anything that might make the panic stop.
I took one pill.
Soon after, my body betrayed me in a way that was worse than the panic itself.
It started with stiffness in my neck. Then violent spasms pulled my head to the side, my back arching against my will. My jaw clenched tightly, and my neck twisted and contorted until I was terrified it might snap.
Even in terror, I could barely muster the courage to ask Dad for a ride to the emergency room.
He did take me back. This time they gave me shots — Benadryl and Valium — and within a short while, the spasms eased.
But the fear lingered.
The terror of that night has never left me.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. That should have meant something. Panic attacks. Medication reactions. Emergency room visits. Drinking more. Grief counseling. A son falling apart after the death of a woman no one in the house seemed willing to ask about.
My father did the practical thing. He drove me to the ER.
But the deeper questions never seemed to enter the room.
Why now?
What happened to you?
Who was Celta?
Why are you falling apart after a year in which you had seemed more alive than ever?
No one asked.
Or if they asked privately, they did not ask me.
No Safe Base
Decades later, my sister would tell me that during this period my parents feared they might come home and find me dead.
Yet they never said that to me then.
Instead, the silence in their house screamed louder than words. In that silence, I heard a message I could never fully shake: that I was of no real value, that my needs were too much, that with all my problems and mistakes, how could I ever hope to help others?
I do not know if those exact words were spoken aloud at that time.
But they lived in me as though they had been.
That is what their house did. It turned need into shame. It turned grief into inconvenience. It turned my dream of becoming a therapist into something fragile and suspect.
Celta had been my safe base. With her, I could rest. I could talk. I could feel myself becoming calmer in her presence. After she died, I was back in the place where my inner life had never been welcomed, trying to grieve the first person who had truly loved me while living with people who did not seem curious about the love I had lost.
The panic made sense.
My body knew I had lost more than a person.
I had lost the place where I felt safe being a person.
The Dream Under Pressure
All of this began to threaten the dream I had been carrying.
I was not drifting, though it may have looked that way from the outside. I had graduated from Georgia Tech, but I already knew engineering was not my path. I wanted social work. More specifically, I wanted psychiatric social work. I had begun to imagine a course: gain experience, apply to graduate school, pursue my MSW, and enter the field that had already helped me understand my own life.
Georgia Regional Hospital had given me the first real evidence that this was where I belonged.
I had volunteered with the social work team on the adult intake unit, where new patients arrived. The work was not symbolic. It was not busy work created to make me feel useful. I learned to gather psychosocial histories, to ask people what had brought them to the hospital, and to listen for the story beneath the diagnosis. I spoke with patients, reviewed information from nurses, doctors, and psychiatrists, and sometimes contacted family members or others involved in the hospitalization.
It was challenging.
Some patients could communicate clearly. Others were harder to reach. Some struggled with reality testing. Some had limited insight into why they were there. Some were so affected by severe psychiatric symptoms that conversation itself became difficult.
I had entered Georgia Tech needing to learn basic social skills. Now I was sitting with people whose illnesses could make communication profoundly complicated.
That required empathy, patience, active listening, and a willingness to stay present when the interaction did not flow easily.
And I loved the work.
Patients talked to me. They trusted me. I felt useful there. I sat in on staff meetings. I learned about diagnoses, treatment, hospitalization, and the human stories beneath clinical language. I knew I had made the right decision. Psychiatric social work was not a vague wish anymore. It had become a direction.
That is why the panic and grief frightened me so much.
After Celta died, my own life began to feel unstable. I was drinking more than I should have. I was being tried on medications. I was having panic attacks and becoming obsessed with the fear of dying. I had gone to the emergency room more than once. My body felt unreliable. My mind felt flooded.
How could I help others when I had so many problems myself?
I do not know whether my mother said those exact words then, though it would have fit the atmosphere of that house. What I know is that the question lived in me. It grew out of her indifference, my parents’ pressure around engineering, and the old shame that treated my needs as evidence that something was wrong with me.
How could I help others when I had so many problems myself?
I do not know whether my mother said those exact words then, though it would have fit the atmosphere of that house. What I know is that the question lived in me. It grew out of her indifference, my parents’ pressure around engineering, and the old shame that treated my needs as evidence that something was wrong with me.
The volunteer work at Georgia Regional had told me one thing: I was on the right path.
My mother’s contempt told me another: you are too damaged to trust yourself.
My father may not have said it that way. He was less likely to name my needs as a burden or attack my dreams with the same force. But he did not challenge her. He did not interrupt the story she told about me. His silence left her version of reality standing.
Both messages existed at once.
The problem was not that I lacked a plan. The problem was that the plan had no safe emotional environment in which to breathe. In that house, grief had no witness, my dreams had no welcome, and my future felt as if it could be swallowed by panic before I ever reached it.
Borrowed Time
One evening in the kitchen, my mother was talking about something. I do not remember what. I stood at the counter, looking away, frustration simmering under the surface.
Then she reached out and placed her hand on mine.
Before I could even think, I recoiled.
Her face twisted in disgust, like a rattlesnake striking. The look in her eyes was so fierce that I thought I might be put out of the house that very night.
I was terrified.
Not just of her anger, but of what would happen if she and my father decided they were done with me. Where would I go? I had no answer. Only the cold fear of homelessness.
Somehow, I was not forced to leave. But the fear that I could be — that I was living on borrowed time under their roof — never left me.
I began to wonder if escape was the only way to survive.
The truth was, I had been looking for a way out for as long as I could remember.
Any way out would have been welcomed by me.
The Door Out
Then, just as I was running out of hope, a door opened.
I had been applying through employment agencies, anything that might get me out. One finally called with a six-month contract in Wilmington, North Carolina — a technical writing position with Corning. They wanted someone with an engineering degree or technical background, and for once, that degree could become a way out rather than a sentence.
The job paid about seventeen dollars an hour, which was decent money in 1992. Because I was being sent away from North Augusta for the contract, there was also a daily per diem. I remember it as somewhere in the range of sixty-five to eighty-five dollars a day, and most of that was not treated like ordinary wages. However the exact numbers worked, the result was clear: I could live comfortably on my own.
That mattered more than I can explain.
I found a roommate in advance, a woman named Donna, and with her share of the rent, I could make it work. I was not thinking long-term. I was not thinking about building a life in Wilmington. I was not imagining Lynn. I was not imagining that the dream of psychiatric social work would regain its footing there.
I was leaving on rocky ground, carrying everything I owned and no real certainty about what would come next.
All I knew was that I finally had a way out.
And beneath the panic, grief, alcohol, medication, and fear, the part of me that wanted to help others was still alive.
At the time, I probably believed my parents were happy for me. I was making decent money now. I could support myself. I could leave their house without needing them to rescue me. I could still pursue graduate school later, as I had planned, and maybe do it on my own.
I needed to believe they were happy for me.
I could not have imagined that decades later I would learn how little my happiness or interests had mattered in the story my family was telling itself.